You mentioned that the Catholic Church was opposed to very specific provisions; can you
mention some of these provisions?
The Catholic Church was opposed to the provision of contraceptives, their argument, that
they proposed in the Supreme Court was that certain contraceptives were abortifacients.
They said that because, in some of the literature, the IUD [intra-uterine device or coil] and
the hormonal contraceptives possibly could prevent the implantation of the fertilised egg,
therefore, by definition, these are abortifacients. In our [Philippine] Constitution, there is a
phrase “an equal protection of the life of the unborn and the mother from the moment of
conception.”
Our argument to the Supreme Court was that fertilisation and conception are not the same
thing. Our argument to the Supreme Court was that the latest scientific authorities were
saying that this was not the mechanism of action even for those two particular
contraceptives, the IUD and the hormonals. So even if some of the justices were
predisposed to find that life begins at fertilisation, which isn’t really in our Constitution, but
even if they were going to find that that would be the interpretation, that the IUD and the
hormonal contraceptives did not fit that criteria anyway.
They had some other objections to the law itself [but these were] not the issues that they
put forward in the Supreme Court: They didn’t think that we should give adolescents
services and information, they were also against that. They were against government
buying contraceptives. Also, they did not like the provision on sexuality education;
particularly, they did not think it was right that children and adolescents should have
sexuality education. So while the debate was often around very particular things in the bill, if
you looked at the argumentation around those debates, a lot of it really was difference in
social philosophy between the feminists and the Church; and how to view sexual relations,
sexuality, gender, gender relations, the role of women etcetera. I think it would begin from
there because oftentimes the science took a very secondary view in the Church.
Oftentimes, we would come up with scientific arguments [on] why, if you want to reduce
maternal mortality, we need really to give, among other things, contraceptive access. They
would always say, ‘ Oh you can take that away and just give services to women like prenatal, etcetera, but don’t give them the contraceptives.’
I should add around the debate that it been a very interesting struggle because you could
see so many tropes -- It was the public health angle, the feminist/gender angle. You could
also see later groups that were very helpful, coming in not because their issue was
essentially women’s health but secularism and democracy in society. You could even see
people who were not as interested in the concept of contraception but they were very, very
much interested in the concept of sexuality and how they look at sexuality.
And there were things that, maybe, as feminists, it was very clear to us how you had to
work with compromises and tolerance of certain differences because there were really
business people who believed that we should reduce our maternal mortality rate for the
sake of growth, for the sake of protecting the environment. Many feminists in our [pro-RH
law] coalition didn’t think that was a good argument, but since the way we structured the bill
was you could put all your reasons in the preamble, you know, up to and including reasons
that we [feminists] weren’t so happy with, like exactly the thinking that we have to reduce
our population growth rate for national economic development etcetera. But if you look at all
the implementable provisions in the bill they really are anchored on a protection of human,
of women’s rights, framework. So if you look at the preamble, you might, if you are an
academic person who wants to unpack things and see contradictions, you might see a
contradiction, let’s say between the human rights protection principles, which are in the
preamble, and then the environmentalist protection, sort of Malthusian arguments that are
also there. But if you look at what the bill [law] wants the Philippine Government and its
cooperating civil society organisations to do, then it’s clearly a women’s health agenda,
based on rights.